Chapter 1: Welcome to the Digital World

Summary

Meet the devices, networks, and basic vocabulary every Grade 5 student needs to start exploring the digital world safely and confidently.

This chapter is part of the Grade 5 Digital Citizenship learning progression. After completing it, students will be able to use the vocabulary, recognize the situations, and apply the habits introduced in the concepts listed below.

Concepts Covered

This chapter covers the following 17 concepts from the learning graph, listed in dependency order:

Digital Device
Internet
Family Device
Laptop
Online Activity
School Device
Smartphone
Tablet
Web Browser
Wifi
App
Public Wifi
Search Engine
Website
Account
URL
Address Bar

Prerequisites

This chapter assumes only the prerequisites listed in the course description. It is the entry point to the textbook.

Maya's First Day

It is the first day of school. Maya walks into Room 12 and finds something new on her desk. It is a thin silver computer with the school's name on the lid. Her teacher smiles and says, "That's your school laptop, Maya. It's yours to use this year."

Maya feels two things at once. She feels excited, because she has never had her own computer before. She also feels a little nervous. There are so many buttons. So many things to click. Where do you even start?

If you have ever felt like Maya, you are in the right place. This whole book is about learning how to use the digital world in a way that is safe, kind, and balanced. This first chapter is where it all begins. We are going to learn the words you need to talk about your devices, the internet, and the websites you visit every day.

Welcome, Friends!

Hi, friends! I'm Maka. I'm a river otter, and I live in the rivers near your school. In this chapter, we'll learn about the devices you use, the internet that connects them, and how to find your way around the web. Take your time. Pause, think, act!

What Is a Digital Device?

Look around your classroom or your home. How many things do you see that have a screen, or light up, or beep? A few? A lot?

A digital device is a tool that uses tiny electronic parts to do work for you. It can show pictures, play sounds, save your writing, or help you talk to a friend far away. The screen lights up when you turn it on. You tap, click, type, or swipe to tell it what to do.

You probably already know three of the most common digital devices.

Three Devices You May Already Know

A laptop is a small computer you can carry from place to place. It has a screen that opens like a book and a keyboard for typing. Maya's silver school computer is a laptop.

A tablet is a flat digital device with a touch screen. It is bigger than a phone but smaller than a laptop. You tap and swipe with your fingers instead of using a mouse.

A smartphone is a small digital device you can hold in one hand. It can make phone calls, but it can also do many of the same things a laptop or tablet can do. You can take pictures with it, play games on it, or open a website.

These three are not the only digital devices in your life. A smart watch is a digital device. So is a video-game console. So is a smart TV, an e-reader, and even some kinds of cameras. There are more digital devices around you than you might think.

Meet Some Digital Devices

Here is something interesting. Some digital devices quietly collect information about you while you use them — things like where you are, what you click, or how fast your heart is beating. Some collect a lot. Some collect only a little. And some, like a regular toaster, don't collect any information at all.

In the interactive picture below, you will see nine different devices. Click on each one to find out whether it is a digital device, whether it collects personal information about you, and what kind.

Open the Digital Devices Explorer in a new tab

Did anything surprise you? You will learn a lot more about private and personal information in Chapter 5. For now, the big idea is this: not every device is the same. The more a device knows about you, the more careful you should be about how you use it. Pause, think, act!

School Devices and Family Devices

Not every device you use belongs to you. Most of the devices in your life fall into two big groups.

A school device is a digital device that belongs to your school. Maya's silver laptop is a school device. The school owns it. The school pays for the internet on it. The school sets the rules for how it can be used.

A family device is a digital device at your home that you share with the people you live with. Maybe it's a tablet on the kitchen counter. Maybe it's a smart TV in the living room. The family owns it, and the grown-ups in your family set the rules.

Knowing which kind of device you are using matters, because the rules are different. Here is a quick way to think about it: school devices follow school rules, and family devices follow family rules.

	School Device	Family Device
Who owns it	The school	Your family
Who sets the rules	Teachers and the district	Your parents or guardians
When you can use it	During school and homework time	When your family says it's okay
If something goes wrong	Tell your teacher right away	Tell a trusted adult at home

If you ever see something on a device that confuses you or makes you feel weird, tell a trusted adult right away. You will not be in trouble for telling. That rule works for school devices, family devices, and every other device for the rest of your life.

The Internet — How Devices Talk to Each Other

Imagine you wrote a letter and dropped it in a mailbox. The letter travels from the mailbox, to a truck, to a sorting center, to another truck, and finally to your friend's mailbox. Now imagine all of that happening in less than a second. That is what the internet does for digital devices.

The internet is a giant network that lets digital devices send messages to each other all over the world. When you watch a video at school, the video is not really inside the laptop. It travels from a computer somewhere far away, through the internet, and onto your screen. When you finish watching, it goes away again.

Devices have to connect to the internet before they can use it. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most common is wifi.

Wifi is a way for digital devices to connect to the internet without using a cable. A small box called a router sends out an invisible signal. Your laptop, tablet, or smartphone picks up that signal and uses it to reach the internet.

Public Wifi: When the Wifi Belongs to a Place

Some wifi belongs to your home or your school. Other wifi belongs to a public place where anyone can join.

Public wifi is wifi at a place anyone can use, like a library, a coffee shop, an airport, or a hotel. It is free, and it can be helpful when you are away from home. But it is also shared with strangers, and that means it is not as safe as the wifi at your school or your home.

Watch Out — Public Wifi

Public wifi is shared with strangers. Don't sign in to your accounts or type your passwords when you're on public wifi. Wait until you're back on your home or school wifi where it's safer.

If you are not sure whether the wifi you are using is safe, ask a trusted adult before you sign in to anything. They will help you check.

Here is a simple picture of how a video gets from a faraway computer to your tablet. The little box called a router is the part of your home or school that sends out the wifi signal.

Diagram: How a Video Gets to Your Tablet

Open the How a Video Gets to Your Tablet diagram in a new tab

Click any blue box in the diagram to read what it does. Notice that the video has to pass through every step before you can watch it on your tablet.

Diagram specification

Type: diagram sim-id: internet-flow
Library: Mermaid
Status: Deployed

A simple horizontal flow diagram showing the path a video takes from a faraway computer to a tablet in a Grade 5 student's bedroom. The diagram has five labeled nodes connected by left-to-right arrows:

Faraway Computer — labeled "A computer somewhere in the world that stores the video"
The Internet — labeled "A giant network of cables and signals that connects computers everywhere"
Router — labeled "A small box in your home or school that sends out the wifi signal"
Wifi — labeled "An invisible signal that carries the video the last few feet"
Your Tablet — labeled "Where you actually see and hear the video"

Visual style: - Friendly, kid-readable. Use rounded rectangles for nodes. - Colors should match the river-blue palette (#2e6f8e for borders) used elsewhere in the textbook. - Each node has a small icon: cloud-server for the faraway computer, globe for the internet, small box for the router, wifi-arc for wifi, tablet outline for the tablet. - Arrows are labeled "video data" to reinforce that the same data is moving the whole way.

Responsive: SVG must scale to container width with no clipping.

Implementation: Mermaid flowchart LR with five nodes and four labeled edges. Render via the pymdownx.superfences Mermaid integration already enabled in mkdocs.yml.

What You Can Do Online

When your device is connected to the internet, you can do lots of things on it. We have a name for this.

An online activity is anything you do on a digital device that uses the internet. Watching a video is an online activity. Looking up a word is an online activity. Sending a message to your cousin is an online activity. Even when a game pauses to check whether you are allowed to play, that is an online activity.

A lot of online activities happen inside small programs called apps.

An app is a small program on a digital device that helps you do one job. There are reading apps, math apps, drawing apps, music apps, and game apps. Some apps need the internet to work, and some don't. The drawing app on your tablet might work without wifi. The video app probably doesn't.

Other online activities happen on websites.

A website is a place on the internet that you visit using a special app called a web browser. You will learn a lot more about web browsers in the next section.

Online activities don't all feel the same. Some make you feel calm or close to people. Some make you think hard. Some get your body moving. Here are a few examples:

Reading a story online or video-calling your grandma — these are heart activities
Doing math practice or looking up how a volcano works — these are brain activities
Playing a dance game or following along with a workout video — these are body activities

You will dig into heart, brain, and body activities a lot more in Chapter 3. For now, just notice that there are many different kinds of online activities, and they each do something different for you.

A Big Idea

Every online activity needs both a digital device and the internet. If your tablet has no wifi, you can still draw on it, but you can't watch a brand-new video, because the video lives out on the internet, not inside the tablet. Pause and think about that for a second!

The Web Browser — Your Window to the Web

Of all the apps on a digital device, one is special enough to deserve its own section. That is the web browser.

A web browser is the app you open to visit websites. You probably already know one. Maybe its icon is a colorful circle. Maybe its icon looks like a compass. There are many web browsers, and they all do the same basic job: they show you websites.

When you open a web browser, you don't just land on a website by accident. Each website has an address, just like your house or your school.

A URL is the address of a website. The letters URL stand for "Uniform Resource Locator," but you don't have to remember those words. Just remember: a URL is like a street address for a place on the internet. For example, www.isd197.org is the URL of the school district's website. Type that URL into a web browser, and the browser will take you there.

Where do you type the URL? At the very top of the web browser, you'll find the address bar.

The address bar is the strip at the top of a web browser where the URL lives. You can read the address bar to see where you are. You can also type a new URL into it to go somewhere new. The address bar is one of the most useful parts of any web browser.

But what if you don't know the URL of the website you want? That is where a search engine comes in.

A search engine is a special website that helps you find other websites when you don't know the URL. You type in a few words about what you are looking for. The search engine gives you a list of websites that might match. Then you click the one that looks right for you.

Here is one way to remember all four of these words. The web is a little bit like a city, and a web browser is like the car you drive around it. Before you look at the table, say the four words to yourself one more time: web browser, URL, address bar, search engine.

Real-world thing	Web-browser thing	What it does
Your car	Web browser	Lets you travel from place to place
A street address	URL	Tells you exactly where a place is
The map on your dashboard	Address bar	Shows where you are right now
A phone book	Search engine	Helps you find a place when you don't know the address

Now let's try it. In the MicroSim below, you can click on different parts of a pretend web browser and see what each part is called.

Diagram: Browser Window Tour

Browser Window Tour — interactive p5.js MicroSim

Type: microsim sim-id: browser-window-tour
Library: p5.js
Status: Specified

Learning objective (Bloom: Remember and Understand): Given a stylized web browser window, the student can identify and name the address bar, URL, search box, and page area, and recall what each one does in their own words.

Visual elements:

A responsive canvas (default 600 × 400, resizes with container width via updateCanvasSize() called first in setup()).
A drawn web browser window with: a title bar containing three colored circles (red/yellow/green) for the close/minimize/maximize buttons, an address bar across the top showing one of three example URLs, a small search-box icon, and a stylized page area below showing a placeholder website (a logo, a heading, and a few colored rectangles representing text and images).
Four clickable regions: address bar, URL text inside the address bar, search box, and page area.
Hover state: a 2-pixel light blue (#4a8aab) glow draws around the region under the mouse.
Click state: the clicked region stays highlighted and a one-sentence explanation appears in a label area below the canvas.
All explanations use exactly the same wording as the chapter prose, so the MicroSim reinforces the definitions instead of introducing new ones.

Controls (built-in p5.js controls per project rules):

createSelect() dropdown to switch between three example URLs: www.isd197.org, www.nasa.gov, kids.nationalgeographic.com. Switching the dropdown updates the URL shown in the address bar of the drawn browser.
createButton('Reset') that clears the highlight and the label area.

Behavior:

On mouseMoved, check which region the mouse is over and draw the hover highlight.
On mousePressed, set a state variable to the clicked region and render its one-sentence explanation in the label area.
On window resize, recompute the layout so the browser window scales with the container.

Implementation notes:

File location: docs/sims/browser-window-tour/ with main.html, main.js, and index.md.
main.html uses a plain <main></main> tag with no id attribute, so teachers can copy main.js directly into the p5.js editor.
In setup(), call updateCanvasSize() first, then canvas.parent(document.querySelector('main')).
Embedded into the chapter via an iframe in the chapter page once the sim files are built. The actual sim files are not part of this chapter task — only the spec lives here.

Implementation: p5.js sketch deployed at docs/sims/browser-window-tour/.

Maka's Tip

Before you click a link, look at the address bar. The URL tells you where you're going. If the URL looks weird, has lots of strange letters, or doesn't match the place you thought you were visiting, pause and think before you click.

Accounts — Your Spot on a Website

Sometimes a website or app is open to everyone. Anyone can visit and look around. Other times, you need a spot of your very own — a place where the website remembers who you are and what you have been doing.

An account is a private spot on a website or app that belongs to you. Think of it like a school library card. The card has your name on it. It is only yours. It lets you check out books that visitors can't take home. An account works the same way. It has your name on it, it remembers your stuff, and it lets you do things that visitors can't do.

To make an account, a website usually asks you for some information about yourself. That is a much bigger conversation, and you will spend a lot of time on it later in this book.

For now, here is the most important rule about accounts. Never make an account on a website or an app without first asking a trusted adult. It does not matter how fun the website looks. It does not matter if all your friends already have one. Always ask first. The trusted adult will help you decide whether the website is safe and whether making an account is a good idea.

Maya's Day, One Week Later

It is one week later. Maya is sitting at her desk in Room 12 with her school laptop open. She is not nervous anymore.

She knows that the silver computer is a digital device. She knows it is a school device, which means it follows school rules. She knows it connects to the internet through the school's wifi. She knows the icon she clicks to visit websites is a web browser, and she knows the strip at the top is the address bar. When she wants to find something for her science project, she types a few words into a search engine and picks the website that looks the most helpful.

Maya feels something new. She feels like she belongs in this digital world.

You belong here too. Here is a quick recap of all 17 new words you just learned.

Digital device — a tool with electronic parts that you tap, click, or type on
Internet — a giant network that connects digital devices
Family device — a digital device shared at home
Laptop — a small computer you can carry
Online activity — anything you do on a device that uses the internet
School device — a digital device that belongs to your school
Smartphone — a hand-held digital device that can also make phone calls
Tablet — a flat digital device with a touch screen
Web browser — the app you open to visit websites
Wifi — a way for devices to connect to the internet without a cable
App — a small program that helps you do one job
Public wifi — wifi at a place anyone can use, like a library or a café
Search engine — a website that helps you find other websites
Website — a place on the internet you visit with a web browser
Account — your own private spot on a website or app
URL — the address of a website
Address bar — the strip at the top of a web browser where the URL lives

Great Work, Friends!

You just learned 17 brand-new words about the digital world. That is a lot! Pause, think, act — you're already on your way to being a great digital citizen. I'll see you in Chapter 2, where we'll learn what it really means to be a digital citizen. Until then — high-five!

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